


The Bridge To Nowhere

by th_esaurus



Category: Hell or High Water (2016)
Genre: Consensual Underage Sex, Domestic Violence, Incest, M/M, POV Second Person, Unhappy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-07
Updated: 2017-05-07
Packaged: 2018-10-29 04:19:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10846338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/th_esaurus/pseuds/th_esaurus
Summary: You liked to look at him. You hadn’t much else to look at, but you liked him best regardless.





	The Bridge To Nowhere

You remembered a nightly ritual, from when you were about eight or nine. 

You and Tanner had shared a bed since just after you had outgrown the old crib in your parents’ room. You had got into the habit of sleeping small, curled up, and your knees knocked into Tanner’s if you slept behind him; so he spooned around behind you, right from the start, his arm draped over your belly. It was fine in the bitter winters, but every arid summer, you threw the windows open at night, slept above the sheets, tossed and turned, all so you could bear the heat of his skin against yours. All through mosquito season you were blotchy and sore, and he helped scratch the itches all over your body, laughing at your long, sobbing groans.

This was not the memory. 

What you remembered, when Tanner was barely in his teens and started wearing black eyes like they were a common symptom of puberty, was your older brother pulling you in against his chest and hips, two-handed, his palms spread on your stomach and neck. He’d hold you fiercely for a second or two, his mouth hot and close to your ear, and would whisper like a mantra:  _ stay little. Stay little, Tobe. Stay little, little brother. _

In your youth it made you stubborn. You hated being scrawny: wanted to help out on the farm, throw lassos like your father, herd the cows like your mother, haul sacks of feed like your brother. You’d stretch out in his arms as though to prove you were growing, even as he forbade you. Sometimes, in a lighter mood, he’d laugh at that, flatten your hair to your forehead, grab at your feet and wrench you into a ball so he could better wrap his legs around you, his whole body hot against your back as you hollered and giggled. On serious nights, he’d bury his nose at the nape of your neck and carry on his whispering. A private prayer, no longer to you, but to a God he once told you he had never believed in, to beg for you to stay young and naive.

You realised, a good many years later, that he knew intimately the sort of age your father would decide you were old enough to beat.

By that point, both of you had long since given up praying.

*

Tanner started playing football in high school, to escape your father in the late afternoons; and then he started partying with his football friends after practice; and then he stopped going to practice and kept partying; and then he lost his football friends and stopped getting invited to parties and just got drunk instead. 

You were still sharing that slim bed, and had to sleep truly tangled in one another’s limbs now that you were fourteen and Tanner had put on a little sports muscle; but now he neglected to come home most nights. Having the thin mattress to yourself was a luxury you didn’t like. Still slept as close to the edge as you could, in case he snuck in the window past midnight and needed his shut-eye.

It was no good even if he did. Your mother had long ago stopped asking where he went; your father simply stored up his wrath for the morning. 

You remembered that, around the time Tanner started staying out, you hit a bad stretch of puberty. Your bones seemed to ache as they grew too fast, your skin felt clammy even in the cold; and you had wet dreams. The visions themselves faded into obscurity as soon as you woke with your hand on your dick and your seed on the bedsheets. The first few times, you cried. You remember. Tanner helped you clean up. 

“Hey now, hey--” he said, a forced brightness in his voice. “Don’t be a pussy, Tobe, huh?” He did not say it cruelly. It was just how he spoke. “Ain’t mean nothing bad, just means you’re gettin’ ready, you know? Gonna be a really ladykiller, ain’tcha, Tobe?”

You jerked off in the bathroom, never in bed. You supposed Tanner must have done the same; could not recall much before that time ever seeing him with his hand on his dick.

He asked you, a lurid grin stretching his mouth, what kinda girls you got off on. You just shrugged, and he pressed you: blonde? Redheads? Short, skinny, little bit of meat on ‘em? Still, you just shrugged. You did not know how to notice women. 

“They’re gonna notice you,” Tanner said, laughing, and then all at once he clammed up. Shoved you aside like you had wronged him. He forgave you moments later, of course, always did; but you wondered if Tanner suffered the same afflictions as your father did. A sudden onset dislike. An irrational need to punish imaginary crimes.

There was a late spring where Tanner spent erratic daytimes wandering the farmland with a can of beer in his hand and his shirt draped around his shoulders, kicking tufts of dry grass under his shabby boot. There had been a spat of coyotes scratching at the border fence and stressing the cows, and Tanner had taken up an old rifle and begun to hunt them in the mornings and evenings. He had a stash of beer in an icebox hooked up to the generator in the barn, and you would run him a fresh drink after you got home from school, and spend the afternoon roughhousing with him gleefully in the long, itchy grass: he taught you how to shoulder the buck of the rifle, though you hated to hold that gun, and how to toss a horseshoe, and how to braid the thicker grass. 

It did not occur to you, until your mother pointed it out quietly over dinner, well into the hot beginnings of summer, that Tanner had been kicked out of school.

But before you realised: you loved those languid afternoons with your brother. Far enough out from the ranch that the building itself was a dusty smudge on the horizon, the gentle braying of the cattle in the air, the dead silence of the of the road that slit your farmland in two, your father’s truck or Tanner’s beat-up Impala the only things that ever trundled down it.

Tanner’s brief musculature was already wasting into a premature beer belly, a softness that you liked under your palms when you grabbed at each other, tussling on the gritty earth. Tanner could put you in an easy headlock, yelling at you to say uncle, and your eyes watered with breathless laughter, elbowing him in the stomach until he called you a little shit and set you free, chasing you across the plains. You tripped over one of his empty cans and careened onto the ground, still hysterical, and he pinned you before you could scramble up; his hands heavy on your wrists, his shins locked over your knees. You could have bucked him.

You didn’t want to.

What kind of girls did it for you? he’d asked. You could only shrug.

His shirt had fallen off in the fight, and he knelt there panting and pinning you for so long you thought the sun would scald his bare back. This close, his breath was bitter, not yet unpleasant, and he had a wispy beard coming through on his chin. The skin around his eyes was red, though the eyes themselves were wide and bright, staring down at you. You looked at him close up often, in bed, but always in low light and with his eyes closed. In the daylight, he was stark: ugly, in many ways, but there was a fondness for you that softened his features. You liked to look at him. You hadn’t much else to look at, but you liked him best regardless.

His breathing hitched, and his mouth was so low and close to yours that you wondered if he would kiss you.

You didn’t know why that was your first thought.

“Open your--” he started. His voice was shaking, and he swore. “Open your mouth--”

You did it without hesitating. Why would you? Your brother had asked it, and you so rarely said no to each other.

Tanner leant in close enough that his stubble grazed your chin. 

“I’m not gonna--” he breathed.

“It’s okay,” you told him. “You can--do whatever.”

“Don’t say that shit,” he hissed. He jerked back. You thought that was it. But his grip on your wrists tightened again, and he turned his head to the side, and you could see his throat working, pulling his spittle up into his mouth, and you knew, then, what he was going to do--

You kept your mouth open. Tanner’s bottom lip just kissed yours for a moment. His spit dribbled across your teeth and onto your tongue. It was thicker than you expected. 

He slammed his palm across your mouth and held it there until you swallowed. Until you swallowed your brother’s spit. You had wanted to give it back to him; to feel the weight of his tongue against yours and taste both of you at once, properly. 

But Tanner let his hand slide off your jaw, your mouth smudging against his palm, and he buried his forehead on your collarbone. His temple was sticky with sweat, and his breath was hotter than the late air, and he let out a noise like a sob.

You wanted to console him. Tell him it was fine. 

You never ended up doing that, much. You wished, in retrospect, that you had, considering all things that came to pass between you.

But you don’t think it would have mattered. 

All the same.

*

There was a swimming hole a two mile trudge out from the ranch, not good for much other than splashing; the water was shallow and dirty and left a line of brown sludge around your legs that you and Tanner sluiced off each other’s bodies afterwards.

About six miles further west was the lean-to church where your father was freshly interred. The bullet wound in his temple was clean, from a distant rifle, but had oozed and festered for almost a full day before he was found; the funeral was small, the casket both cheap and closed. Your mother had to pay a man to say decent things about your father, and tell the gathered few that he was with God now. Tanner, drunk, had laughed, spat into the hole in the ground, and stormed away from the church cursing. Your mother, silently, cried.

You thought it was relief that moved her.

You and your brother went out the water less often than you had as kids. You were taller than he was at sixteen, and had a little way yet to grow. You’d pass him by an inch or two by the time you were done. He might have been sore about this at one point in time, but since your father had died, Tanner was ever so slightly more forgiving of the world at large, and his own foibles in particular.

Since Tanner had shot your father. 

You were doing poorly at school, and did not interrupt when you heard the teachers’ whispers about your family troubles. Your mother had asked you to stay until your graduation, so you would, but Tanner cared little for formal education and was loud about it. 

You should have been at school now. But you had hiked to the watering hole with Tanner instead, carrying a threadbare towel under your arm while he dragged a six-pack of beer. His drinking was worse, now that he was twenty-one. Nobody had any legal recourse to stop him. Nobody much cared to, truth be told.

Though the water was no good to swim in, the pool was shallow and wide, and you could float for long minutes at a time, both of you bobbing about on the water’s surface like pondweed. Your shoulders or toes brushed Tanner’s every now and then, as you scooped the water with your cupped hands to keep away from the muddy rim of the pool. It was how you often felt about Tanner: drawn to him, bumped gently back into his arms by a low, invisible current of your own making. 

You wanted him in your life, always, and were terrified to lose him to drink or boredom or women. 

“He’s not good for you,” your mother had warned, the night after your father’s funeral, when Tanner was out on the farmland, shooting at straggling birds in the twilight. “Not good for nobody.”

“He’s better than Paw,” you’d said, then bit the inside of your cheek in regret.

“He takes after his father,” your mother murmured.

Your mother had been in love with your father once, and not the reluctant, settling kind: she had loved him with the full force of her girlish heart, and even when he had hit her, she found it so easy to forgive him. 

Tanner had never hit you, so you had nothing to forgive. But you stayed away a long time that night, wondering why you felt so akin to your mother, when Tanner was your blood, your brother. No choice in the matter. Not like she’d had. 

You bobbed in the water and grasped suddenly for his hand. You wanted to know he was there, even when you could not see him; when you were forced to look at the sky. 

Both of you were naked, your clothes piled on a dry speck of mud a few feet out from the water. You missed his hand, and got a handful of his thigh. That was okay. You pulled him towards you nonetheless, lined your two bodies up on the surface of the water, blue above you, blue below you, and further below that, gritty brown, the wet colour of the earth; the same colour your father’s blood had dried after it quit oozing from the bullet hole in the side of his head.

“You wishin’ we could stay here?” Tanner asked, neither loud nor quiet out here in the wide open.

“Not as such,” you replied. The water was not warm. His leg pressed up against yours was warmer.

“Then what?”

“I dunno.”

“You never know.”

“I’m not a smart kid,” you admitted.

Tanner clucked his tongue in admonition. “Fuck off. You’re a good kid. An okay kid. People like us, we can’t ever be better than okay. Never got a chance.”

He could be briefly philosophical, sometimes, in his own way. 

His leg was still brushed up against yours, all the way from ankle to hip. You wished your muscles could knit with his: you’d be stronger and braver as one man, always missing a part of each other split as you were. His skills with a gun, his confidence, your greater tact, how good you were with the animals. A good farmer, this imaginary twinned soul, if not necessarily a good man.

As if to break the melancholy, both of you at once turned over with an almighty splash, both belly-down in the water. It was a game you’d always played: how long you could hold your breath under water. It covered your ears all in a rush, like a sudden yell, dissolving into a bubbling hum that blocked out all the world until, minutes later, you heard Tanner’s breath bubbling out of his lungs. He used to win, but now he smoked. Air often deserted him. He couldn’t run the length of a football field anymore, without panting. Not that he would.

You stayed under a second or two more. 

Did you wish you could stay here? In this quiet rushing dark, with your eyes closed and the world blotted out and your brother’s hands on your shoulders?

When you were littler, and knelt in the water after this game, it used to cover up to your waist. Now, as your knees settled into the mud and you sucked in breath after breath, the water lapped against your dick, completely above the surface. Tanner’s too. His cock was dark and hooded. Neither of you had been circumcised. You had never seen a cock that was. You had never seen a cock save for your own or your brother’s. 

You stared at him for a long time. His face, flushed and dirty from the water, panting like you, a fleck of mud caught on his bottom lip. You must have had it too, because he sloshed his palm in the water to try and clean it then clambered over to you on his knees and rubbed at your mouth and cheeks, pulling them taut to get a better look at your skin, your pores. It was easy to stumble, crawling around like this in the mud. 

His cock nestled against yours, and you pressed in, your hips magnetised. 

You wanted to put your mouth on him. On his dick, to be precise. 

You had thought about it often over the years.

You had a lot of desires unacted upon. What good would it do? What made you deserving of it?

“You’re--” Tanner started. You were getting hard, and it embarrassed you. Your cheeks were already pink from holding your breath, from his rubbing, and you could not blush more, but you felt the warmth of your dick against his; and vice versa. That subtle charge of heat. He was still holding your jaw; you were both still panting. 

“Lemme--” Tanner started again. And he grabbed your shoulders and pushed you away so he could get a better look at the whole of you. “Lemme see you--”

He held your cock. His hand right around it. His fingers stubby and, despite the water, dry from being so rough. You could not breathe enough, it seemed, despite your heaving chest. And then he made light of it, hefting your dick as though he were checking a bull, gauging the weight of it, eyeing the length of it, guessing an inch too short as you hardened in his grip. He shuffled close again, got his own dick in his hand, both of you nestled in the same palm, his hard too, and fatter, and redder, and despite the differences, he huffed, “We’re the same,” as though that were the point of the entire exercise--

“Tan,” you whispered.

But here, like this, his name was a taboo.

He grabbed you by the neck with both his bulky arms. Wrestled you down into the water, pushing your face into the mud as far as it would go, so that it stuck to your hair and pushed in through your mouth and you tasted sickly grit on your tongue and teeth. He left you there to choke and spit, stomping through the water and grabbing his clothes and his beer, pulling on his jeans without zipping up the fly, so that his erection stuck out through the zipper even as he looked down and cussed it. You thought he would storm back to the farm like that, blazen and furious. 

But he waited with his back to you, until you clambered out of the water. He forced you to drink half a can of beer to clean out your mouth, and poured the rest over your head, ruffling your hair. You’d smell like him, you thought. He smelled of alcohol. 

“Take care of it,” he barked, rough, glancing down at where you, too, were still hard. “Can’t walk around like that. Not decent.”

“How ‘bout you?”

It was a dangerous thing to ask, when he was like this.

“I got it,” he huffed. 

And the two of you jerked off into the little watering hole, standing a foot apart, your legs spread. It did not take long. Your come, when you came, was slick and white on the water for a second, before it drifted below the surface and sank out of view. 

“Tanner--” you said, because you thought he had finished too.

But he had not. He meant to say your name as a warning that he was close; but he was closer than he thought. Split over his hand and into the water with your name a groan on his lips. “Tobe--” he said. “Toby, fuck--”

His left leg twitched as he orgasmed. 

You both watched his seed sink in silence. And then you tucked yourself into your jeans and pulled on your shirt and walked back to the ranch with him, trailing a little way behind, your head low, your dick tender, and your wet hair dripping into your downcast eyes. 

*

A week after your eighteenth birthday, Tanner left the ranch for good. 

About a month before this, he was inside of you for the first and only time.

Your mother tolerated his absence and his indifference less and less. She could manage the ranch fine on her own - she always could’ve, had your father let her - but you had a taken up an evening shift at a hardware store, stock-taking in the back room, which you drove yourself to and from and earned a little cash in hand; Tanner took money from her purse and bought cigarettes and beer. He had never had a job. Sometimes he stole. He stole a car once. Took you for a ride in it before he sold it on, all the windows down, though it was midnight and cold and the headlamps barely worked. The road was so straight and empty that he floored it even in the dark. He yelped like something wild, bared his teeth to the wind, animal and free. You held onto the dashboard through the whole drive.

You weren’t sure whether your brother scared you sometimes.

You had heard him arguing with your mother in the kitchen most nights. Like your father used to.

He did not come to bed after, but went out. Only God knew where. You had the single bed to yourself, and would squeeze your eyes shut, trying to seek out the thread of Tanner’s existence in the air around you, as though it were something physical you could grab and follow, a loose spool of wool in an old sweater. Mostly you ended up picturing him with girls. He was as bad at girlfriends as he was at work, but he was proficient in charming a girl enough for a one night stand.

You still could not name what you looked for in a girl. You tended to avert your eyes, whenever you saw one in town. As though, if you could not see them, they could not see you either. 

Sometimes you buried your face in the pillow that still smelled a little of Tanner, your nostrils flared and your mouth open; put your tongue against the clammy cotton, and jerked off.

On the night where he fucked you, you had fallen asleep once already; woke at maybe two in the morning to find Tanner sitting by the open window, his shirt off, his soft chest doused in moonlight. He was smoking. He had been out. When your father was alive, Tanner got adept at climbing up the back of the house quietly, though he was noisier about it now that getting caught didn’t matter. He must have woken you.

He knew you were awake, and took his cigarette out of his mouth, offering you a draw. He always left a dent near the stub of his cigarettes. His front teeth had grown in askew, and he’d always blamed your father’s first real punch: struck when his adult teeth had still not fully come through. 

You declined, climbing slowly out of bed to join him. 

He seemed melancholy. 

When Tanner was younger, he was often pitbull angry. Stocky and loud and gearing for a fight. All his emotions seemed vivid and bright: that savage anger, or his barking laughter, or his moody discontent, or the rare joy that made his eye shine and his grin realer than ever. 

Now he was dulled out and distant. 

You sat with him at the window ledge, his back next to your back, and you leaned your head on his shoulder gently. You wanted to be gentle with him, these days, though you had always rough-housed growing up. You suspected, though he was absent from much of your day to day life, that Tanner did not see much kindness. Never really had.

“This place ain’t for me,” Tanner said, eventually.

You felt a jolt shudder through you; contained it.

“Ma hates me,” he carried on, almost talking to himself.

“Sure she don’t.”

“She hates me and she ain’t shy about it. Told me I’ll end my ass up in jail before I’m thirty. She’s right, y’know.” Tanner had already been arrested twice. His chances were running out. “Maybe I’ll head on out to Vegas. Make my fortune on poker. Can’t nobody lose at poker.”

The thought that your brother would leave once and for all made you cold. Waiting for his return sustained you, most nights. That thrill of relief, almost orgasmic, when he slipped into bed behind you for an hour or two before dawn, after four days of absence. Wrapped his arms around you, his body dank with old cologne and someone else’s cheap perfume, and alcohol still sharp on his breath.

“Don’t go,” you whispered.

“It’d be better for you too, Tobe,” he said.

“Don’t go--” you told him again, and shuffled in close, so that you were almost tangled in embrace. He stubbed his cigarette out on the windowsill. You craned your head, and laid your mouth on his neck. You adored the smell of him. It was unpleasant, but so familiar. 

It was not a kiss that you pressed against his neck until suddenly, undeniably, it was.

Before he could retort, you got your hand in under his jeans. Forced awkwardly under the fly, until his strained button popped open and the zip slid down to let you in. He had on no underwear, and must’ve gone out to fuck. It was the first time you had touched his cock with purpose, and you hated that someone else had been there before you earlier in the night. His dick felt like it looked: heavy and thick, and good in your rough hand. You exhaled shallow and quick as you stroked it.

“Quit it,” Tanner said, not yet moving to stop you.

“It’s okay,” you breathed, gripping him a little firmer.

“I said stop it, Tobe--”

“It’s really--I ain’t mind--”

This is when Tanner lost it. He grabbed your wrist first, hoisted it up high, twisting it in a way that made you let out an ugly yelp. He got his forearm at your neck and pushed you back until your knees hit the bed, then down with a hard thud, still pinning your wrist above your head; he shucked up your sleep shirt, his hand suddenly on your skin, and turned you over onto your belly, his heavy thighs either side of you, holding you down.

You had grown strong since your father died; forced to by farm-work and labour. Tanner was only thick, not hugely strong. You could have fought him, punched and scratched at him until he relented and let you up.

You didn’t.

“Is this what you want, huh?!” Tanner hissed, close to your ear, and you realised abruptly that he wanted you to say no. That it did not reassure him when you said all this was okay. If he forced himself upon you, perhaps, to him, that was better: you were not complicit. He had kept you out of the darker parts of his life, had not told you he would kill your father that spring afternoon, had never asked you to keep lookout for him when he took up thieving, did not make you come to court when they read him his charges the first time. Your mother had yelled at you once for letting Tanner take her jewellery to the pawn shop in town, and Tanner yelled back that you hadn’t a single damn thing to do with it. Her jewellery was all worthless anyway.

You wanted this. You wanted him. You had never been able to deny that.

You could only nod, and listen as Tanner sucked in a ragged breath through his bent teeth.

“You shoulda stayed little, Tobe,” he said, very, very bitterly. You did not understand what he meant. Your father was dead. “Then I wouldn’t’ve--”

He cut himself short like he had been slapped. 

“Tan,” you breathed. “I ain’t mind. I ain’t mind any of it.”

“You don’t know any fucking better,” Tanner spat. You hated his vitriol, hated that you could tell that it was not directed at you, but inwards.

Both of you seemed to wait a long time. It was out in the open now, as much as it ever would be. Tanner was still astride you, down by your thighs and ass. You weren’t even sure what you wanted of him, only that you did.

“Here--” you managed, and put your hands down on the back on your waistband, and shuffled your shorts down, so that the swell of your ass was pale and bared to him. 

“Fuck, fucking Christ--” you heard him whisper, and he sounded so quietly angry. 

He did not touch you right away. You could only hear him shifting behind you, shuffling further back, leaning forward, the creak of the bed, the shift of his old jeans, his hot breath through his nose, at first, and then his mouth.

Tanner didn’t warn you before he touched you. Just put his hands on your ass, both at once, and spread you enough to make your breath stutter, and put his blunt thumb right where you opened up. Not inside. Just a pressure. 

You knew he was going to put his cock inside of you.

“Tan,” you sighed. 

He spent a long time gathering spit in his mouth. He had a half used tube of lubricant that he fetched from inside an old boot he never wore anymore: he must have used it in the shower, to masturbate. You were shocked he still had secrets from you in this little room. Or perhaps you’d forced yourself not to pay attention. To allow him any space you could, so that he felt untethered to this room, this house; a free man and not a stifled boy. 

He rubbed that messy slick up and down your ass with the flat of his fingertips, never daring to push in - you didn’t even realise, until many years later, that it was something he could have done to ease the way. More on his dick, spit and lube, and while he was busy at it, you turned onto your back, desperate to see him.

“I can’t do it with you fucking lookin’ at me--” Tanner muttered, turned away from you.

“I gotta--” you breathed. “I hafta see you.”

“Fuck,” Tanner groaned. He sounded so hurt, and you put your hands on his knees, smoothed over his kneecaps with your palms to try and soothe him. You had always been good with the cows when they were stressed; Tanner was so animal that you naturally assumed you could do the same.

On your back, it was easier for your dick to thicken up. You didn’t touch it. Absurdly, you didn’t want to make this any more about sex than it already was. You thought Tanner might bolt if you did. All that mattered, right now, was to get Tanner inside of you.

“Please,” you said. You were so ready for it.

“Don’t do that,” Tanner said, that terrible hurt in his voice again. “Don’t beg. Not for this.”

“I want you,” you said anyway.

“Tobe--” he managed, and he made the mistake of looking you in the eye. You were both caught in it. His dick dripping slick and thick and hard, his chest heaving, his neck flushed, his mouth open. He looked awful; he looked beautiful. Only you had ever seen him like this. You were certain of it.

It seemed like he saw the same in you, and his eyes were red and woozy with it all.

He wrenched his gaze away from you, and manhandled your legs up, bent at the waist and knee to bracket his hips. 

“You tell me no, little brother,” Tanner said, stoic. “You tell me no, right now.”

“I won’t,” you sighed, close to delirium.

It took him a long time to push inside of you, and it hurt all the while. He was too wide and you were unused to it, had never done more than played a shy finger around your asshole once or twice in the shower, too ashamed to put it fully in. He held you by the hips, keeping you still, and eased in with as much gentleness as his rabid soul could muster. Tanner was crying. He was crying as he forced his way inside. Not loud, both of you learnt young to cry quiet, but nonetheless. A few of his tears skipped his cheek entirely and dripped down onto your chest. You would have felt them, could you feel anything except the strain of your body trying, desperately, to welcome him in. 

After forever--

“It’s in,” Tanner breathed. “I’m--”

Neither of you moved. You’d thought he’d fuck you, feral, like he must do with his girls, guiltless and grinning. But he was still. Waiting for you. Gentle for you.

You were one person with him, and you felt the relief in the marrow of your bones.

“Please,” you said, barely a whisper.

“Yeah, okay,” he agreed. The same.

Slowly, so slow, like bringing a horse from standing into a trot, he started to fuck you. Your brother, your same, your soul. 

And then there was a noise from the landing. The heavy creak of a floorboard. The door to your mother’s room; it always hit the wall too hard, even if she opened it softly, after your father had kicked away the door bumper in a fit of rage once. 

She had often complained of how dry her throat got at night, in the late summer. Even though she took a pitcher of water and a glass to bed with her, sometimes she still got up and padded down the hall, past your room, towards the kitchen. 

Every muscle in Tanner’s body seemed to contract. He slammed his hand down into your mouth, hard enough that you tasted copper, and held you by the thigh, and pulled out. It hurt more than you had imagined and you sobbed against his palm, clutching at his torso in the desperate need to do something with your hands. He coddled you against him, hushing you, apologising to you, pressing your face into his neck to muffle your sobs, and it was so like the times he had taken care of you after your father fell into his anger and could not come out of it without beating one or the other of you--

You stayed like that until you heard the running tap, your mother’s footsteps getting loud and then quiet again. The click of her door closing.

You heaved in such a breath it was like you had been drowning. Tanner ran his hand through your sweat-wrecked hair. “I’m sorry,” he said, over and over and over. “I’m sorry, Tobe, I’m sorry, I’m sorry--”

You, too, were so, so sorry.

*

Years later, when Tanner was into his second year of jail and you had just been paid from your drilling gig, you spent a handful of cash on a man who looked about your age and was willing to fuck you. You did it at night, against the fence outside the ranch. You did not want to take him inside, where your mother was, and where your room still had a few of Tanner’s clothes he’d left behind, what seemed a lifetime ago.

It didn’t do you much good. He grunted and called you baby, which you hated. His dick was cut and objectively pretty, but he had no girth. You asked him, half way through, if he could get his thumb in there too, and he took offence at this.

He came, and you did not, and you paid him what you’d agreed anyway.

You spent the night thinking of your brother, Tanner.

You remembered, very gradually, all your old nightly rituals. From when you were little, and he had begged you, for his sake and your own, to stay that way.


End file.
